Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend

475 Pages·2005·2.27 MB·English

by  Stephen Davis

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Jim
Morrison
life, Death, legend
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ALSO BY STEPHEN DAVIS
Hammer of the Gods
Walk This Way
Reggae Bloodlines
Reggae International
Bob Marley
Say Kids! What Time Is It?
Moonwalk
Fleetwood
This Wheel’s on Fire
Jajouka Rolling Stone
Old Gods Almost Dead
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Jim
Morrison
life, Death, legend
STEPHEN DAVIS
GOTHAM BOOKS

Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Published by Gotham Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First electronic edition, April 2006
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Copyright © 2004 by Stephen Davis
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Davis, Stephen, 1947–
Jim Morrison : life, death, legend / by Stephen Davis.
p. cm.
MSR ISBN 0 7865 6325 7
AEB ISBN 0 7865 6326 5

Set in Cremona Regular with Trajan and Abbess
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For
JIM MORRISON
1943–1971
KATA TON ∆AIMONA EAYTOY
Ex-fan des sixties
Ou sont tes années folles?
Que sont devenues toutes tes idoles?
—Jane Birkin
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CONTENTS
Introduction ix
BOOK one. jimmy
chapter one. The Lizard King’s School Days 3
chapter two. Cancel My Subscription 29
chapter three. Learn to Forget 57
BOOK two. jim morrison
chapter four. Back Door Man 99
chapter five. The Warlock of Rock 157
chapter six. Sunken Continents 221
BOOK three. JAMES DOUGLAS MORRISON
chapter seven. Lord of Misrule 305
chapter eight. THE Soul of a Clown 357
chapter nine. Last Tango in Paris 403
Epilogue. the Cool Remnant of a Dream 461
Author’s notes 475
selected sources 479
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INTRODUCTION
H
e’s been dead for decades, but he’s still causing trouble.
Jim Morrison was a mesmeric figure in the American sixties, a
rebel poet and godhead in snakeskin and leather. He lived fast, died
young, and left a less-than-exquisite corpse in Paris while hiding out from
the law. In his prime the writers and critics went nuts trying to do his
weird mojo some measure of justice. (One called him “an angel in grace
and a dog in heat.”) Jim was the greatest American rock star of his era,
and one of its most publicized celebrities, but—more than three decades
later—his life and works have yet to yield all their secrets and enigmas.
Jim Morrison tried to set the night on fire. As lead singer of the
Doors, he was an acid evangelist on a suicide mission to deprogram his
generation from what he saw as a prisonlike conformity to social and sex-
ual norms. He was a seer, an adept, a bard, a drunk, a bisexual omnivore.
Jim styled his band “erotic politicians,” and relentlessly urged his huge
audience—at the height of the dangerous sixties—to break on through
the doors of perception, to free themselves from robotic familial condi-
tioning, to seek a higher, more aware consciousness. Doors concerts—
throbbing with war-dance rhythms and superheated intimacy—were as
close to the experience of shamanic ritual as the rock audience ever got.
The Doors captured the unrest and the menace that hung in the air of
the late sixties like tear gas, and they did it with hypnotic cool.
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Between 1965 and 1971 Jim Morrison wrote a hundred songs,
recorded seven platinum albums, wrote and published four editions of
poems, made three films, recorded his poetry, wrote screenplays, and
filled dozens of notebooks with verse and notations. He played more
than two hundred concerts with the Doors. He established himself as a
sex icon and the major American rock star of the sixties. He violated all
of puritan America’s sexual taboos and—in a frenetic burst of political
energy—even threatened the vindictive Nixon administration with his
blatant invitations to protest and revolt.
Jim Morrison, as it turns out, was much more important than anyone
realized at the time. Critically dismissed as a has-been Bozo/Dionysius
before his death, Morrison’s poetic visions have stayed on the radio for
more than thirty years, and on into the new century. They have become
the classic texts of classic rock, reaching out to generations beyond the
one that first understood the deepest meanings, the organic unity, and
the transcendent qualities of his greatest work.
Jim Morrison was the last incarnation of that quintessential late-
romantic figure, the demonically aroused poet shaking with rage at his
world and his contemporaries; a prophet with terrible eyes and rigid fea-
tures, clad in black leather. He was arguably the major poet to emerge
from the turmoil of the legendary American sixties. Decades later, Jim
Morrison has materialized as the true avatar of his age. His words are
burned into the brains of three American generations—the emergency
telegram of “Break On Through,” the visionary cadences of “L.A.
Woman,” and the mysterious whispered verses of “Riders on the Storm.”
His voice echoes on classic-rock stations from coast to coast. His image
haunts dorm walls everywhere, emblazoned: JIM MORRISON / AMERICAN
POET / 1943–1971. The Doors’ album sales, as of this writing, are over
fifty million units, and climbing.
Today, more than thirty years after Jim Morrison died, important
new revelations are emerging concerning his tumultuous life, his tragic
death, and his enduring legend. And the questions about him still linger.
Who was he really? Why did he destroy himself? Why was he failed by
everyone who knew him?
* * *
INTRODUCTION
x
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I
t wasn’t all great,being a rock god in the sixties. The tours were
primitive and disorganized. The groupies were pretty, but they gave
you herpes and the clap. The drugs and alcohol turned you into an im-
becile. Your old lady slept around while you were on tour. The critics
hated you when you got huge, and suddenly the press that had built you
up into a deity began to tear you down. The Doors at their best were
about as good as rock music ever got. At their worst, they were one of
the most pretentious bands on the planet. But no one had a clearer grasp
of the complexities and ironies of the age than Jim Morrison.
Living the times as he did, in full senses-deregulated consciousness,
Jim understood the American sixties for what they were: an era of new
religious visions, spiritual crisis, political unrest, race riots, assassina-
tions—as well as a rare opportunity for change and reform. The decade’s
promises were never fulfilled, but some of its goals—such as integration,
civil rights, the “global village,” and the bringing of East and West into
closer harmony—are clearly still in process. Jim Morrison hitchhiked
along this psychic landscape like a killer on the road, and the Doors’ mu-
sic still has the uncanny power to poison every new class of ninth
graders with its dark messages and raw power. What thirteen-year-old
today can play “People Are Strange” and not hear it as a postcard of
comfort from beyond the grave? How many dead rock stars have an an-
nual riot at their tomb?
I
n one of his unpublished spiral notebooks,sometime in
1968, Jim penned his credo in blue ink: “I contend an abiding sense
of irony over all I do.”
Jim Morrison’s famous “Lizard King” persona was a joke, but it was a
serious joke, a cosmic put-on. Jim’s serial evocation of the American
desert and its reptilian underworld was part of his existential drive to in-
clude in the experience of life the omnipresence of impending death. In
another notebook entry he wrote: “Thinking of death as the climactic
point of one’s life.”
John Densmore, the Doors’ drummer, who was often frightened and
bewildered by Jim Morrison’s behavior, later observed that all the other
California bands of the sixties preached the raising of consciousness to-
INTRODUCTION
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